For Amanda Plummer, It's Bring On The Eccentrics

WE'VE HEARD THE story before: Lonely young woman in a nowhere job falls for exciting killer; a road trip with the requisite mayhem ensues. The new British film "Butterfly Kiss," which opens on Friday, has its lonely young woman, all right, but the exciting killer is played by Amanda Plummer.

Nipples pierced, spouting biblical quotations, Ms. Plummer's Eunice may be tough for an audience to take. And that's not all: the character is also masochistic, sadistic, bisexual and homicidal.

As Ms. Plummer, 39, puts it in her quavering, breakable-china voice: "I don't play roles everybody likes. I'd rather have a career I'm proud of. Like everyone else, I need to eat. But I'm a very unbusinesslike person, and I keep my price low. I'm not a mass product. I'm not everyone's cup of tea."

It's true that in the late 70's, when she appeared in her first Off Broadway play, "Artichoke," the critic John Simon likened her to Shirley Temple doing Boris Karloff. (Of her Eunice in "Butterfly Kiss" one might she sounds like Tinkerbell doing Travis Bickle.) In 1979, she was in her first film, "Cattle Annie and Little Britches." Pauline Kael, writing about her in that film in The New Yorker, said, "The only other actress I've seen make a movie debut so excitingly, weirdly lyrical was Katharine Hepburn."

On Broadway, Ms. Plummer went on to win Tony Awards for "A Taste of Honey" in 1981 and "Agnes of God" in 1982. The following year, after Sidney Lumet directed her in the film "Daniel," he compared her to the young Marlon Brando.

Still, the next time America's darling, Meg Ryan, turns down a role, it's not likely to go to Amanda Plummer. Ms. Plummer specializes in playing incandescent eccentrics. Like Lydia, the bashful object of Robin Williams's affections in the 1991 film "The Fisher King." Or Honey-Bunny, the twitchy, trigger-happy would-be robber in "Pulp Fiction." Or Eunice, the self-mutilating mass murderer in "Butterfly Kiss," in which she stars with Saskia Reeves.

"I'm lucky I'm not a babe who wants to do character roles," says Ms. Plummer, who drives an un babelike 1979 Volvo and lives in a rented house in Coldwater Canyon in Los Angeles with the English screenwriter Paul Chart. "I like taking a path into new country, and I always take the darker path. Not because it's dark but because there's a secret there that you can share when you get out. That's what I liked as a kid. That's how I approach my work. With a face like mine, it's lucky I have a heart that likes that. "I don't find anything interesting about the choices a character faces in major films or theater projects," she adds. "The characters are just cut-out dolls with the American flag sewn on them."

As the only child of a brief marriage between the American actor Tammy Grimes and the British actor Christopher Plummer, Ms. Plummer had an unusual upbringing.

"My mother was larger than life," she says. "She was very glamorous, which is probably why I was a tomboy. Fortunately, now when I wear something nice I don't lose my identity." With her mother frequently on the road and her father in England, she often lived with her grandparents in New England.

"My grandmother was schizophrenic," she says. "I'd look into her eyes and see a self that had no opinion. I was allowed to say or feel anything."

But Ms. Plummer preferred to say things in writing and feel things in books. She was anchored to the Earth in ways that most people would not recognize. "I had a strong propensity, which I still have, to be invisible," she says. "In grade school, I'd try to disappear and become formless. I lived in a very imaginary world. I loved poetry and wrote my first novel when I was 9. It was about a little girl and the people she met in the woods.

"I was going to be the hero of my own life. When you live in a world of make-believe it's not because something is bad but because something is more in the make-believe. Everything was more heightened, more love, more death. I'm an opera. If I didn't act, I'd be all over the place."

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Because she came from a family of theatrical luminaries, her decision to act wap a complicated one. "It's not easy to follow in the parents' footsteps," she says. "Now it's O.K., but it wasn't at first. I'd hear a lot of, 'That's not your voice, that's my voice. You sound too much like me; you're doing that on purpose.' "

WHEN, AT THE AGE OF 21, she made her Off Broadway debut, she so impressed Lamont Johnson that he asked her to audition for his film "Cattle Annie."

"She came in to read in a torn man's shirt, torn jeans and hair hanging all around her face," he says. "Not improper grooming. No grooming, period. She was smoking furiously, and I kept wondering if she was going to set herself on fire. So I went over and pulled her hair back to see her marvelous bone structure, and it was like I rape' her. Her eyes got frightened, and she withdrew. I said, 'But we can't see you acting,' and she completely changed.

"Ask her to be a character in a story and she's on fire," he continues. "She walks on crumbling ground, and she knows it, and yet she keeps right on taking the next step. It's the danger you smell around people who live on the edge that makes them exciting. And she's got plenty of that."

Elizabeth Ashley, who played a psychiatrist opposite Ms. Plummer's pregnant nun in "Agnes of God," says: "She's one of those people who has no physical skin, no calluses, no shell. She doesn't act; she absorbs."

To play Eunice, Ms. Plummer, not a British bisexual serial killer herself, had quite a bit of absorbing to do: she had to become a woman who spoke with a strong Blackpool accent, chopped off a man's head, engaged in explicit nude love scenes, and wore chains dangling from rings that pierced some very sensitive parts of her body. (Through movie magic, the piercings only looked real.)

"Eunice's sense of isolation, her feeling of being at odds with the world and other people, her wanting people to recognize who she is but feeling a great distance between them -- maybe that's what appealed to Amanda about the character," suggested the film's director, Michael Winterbottom. "And why she's so good at the role."

As for the roots of Eunice's character, "bisexuality was not a central issue," he says.

"We wanted a story of two opposites, one person being aggressive and strong and forcing people to pay attention, and one being passive and quiet and being ignored. We thought it would be too crude if one were a man and one were a woman. We thought it would be nicer if they were of the same sex."

Like a number of other actors, Ms. Plummer has chosen to pursue big roles in small movies rather than small roles in commercial ones. Lawrence Bender, the producer of "Pulp Fiction," thinks that this trend took off when low-budget movies stopped being synonymous with exploitation movies.

"In a low-budget film, there are fewer financial pressures, and an actor like Amanda can take more risks," he says. "She's a chameleon, and a chameleon you can't take your eyes off."

Correction: An article on April 28 about the actress Amanda Plummer misstated the nationality of her father, the actor Christopher Plummer. He was born in Toronto and is Canadian, not British. An article on April 28 about the actress Amanda Plummer misstated the nationality of her father, the actor Christopher Plummer. He was born in Toronto and is Canadian, not British.